Posts from the ‘Debian Custom Installer’ Category

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Continuing on with this project it became necessary to look a little deeper on how apt based software repositories handle version numbers. At first I thought this was the silliest overly complicated mess I could imaging. For instance, how does one compare package versions that look like this ‘2:1.0~rc3++svn20100804-0.2squeeze1′ with versions that look like this ‘2:1.0~rc3++final.dfsg1-1′ to determine which is newer? Luckily this is actually well documented, makes perfect sense when you stop to think about it, and (through the power of open source) easy to accomplish programatically. Read more

Following on with this project I have finally put together a script to custom build a Debian installation ISO. Although this script does not provide a solution to all the design goals I had in mind it does provide a simple method and framework to work towards my ultimate goals. Read more

Following on in this project, I realized that rolling my own distribution is a bad idea. I sat and thought about what makes a distribution; how much does one have to change an existing distribution before it becomes its own? What I am really after is Debian but remixed with my default desired application, configurations, and themes.

Earlier I spoke about having an absolutely basic installation (debootstrap) which I would boot into and then use a “stage-2″ script to install the packages I would want. There are a few problems with this design which have caused me to ditch the stage-2 script entirely. Read more

It takes a great amount of work to roll ones own OS. What I was/am after is a simpler way. I method to quickly assemble what I need , even if my own philosophy changes. I looked at several technologies that already exist: Debian Live, Debian Custom CD, and all sorts of tailoring options such as preseeding; but ultimately none of these gave me exactly what I wanted. From this has arisen a new project that I hope to write more about as I progress. Read more